The Troubles

The fighting Irish in Conor McPherson’s new play.

Dunne and Hinds are down and out in Dublin in “The Night Alive.”Credit Illustration by Leslie Herman

Conor McPherson’s “The Night Alive” (an Atlantic Theatre Company production at the Linda Gross, directed by the playwright) is about poverty, economic and otherwise. It’s also about the failure of realism. Or, more specifically, the struggle that artists like the forty-two-year-old McPherson go through to make lyrical realism matter in a culture dominated by its various simulacra: issue-driven documentary films, memoirs, reality TV.

First produced last summer, at London’s Donmar Warehouse, with the same cast, the almost two-hour show is performed without an intermission, but it is filled with pauses. The play’s eight scenes, which range from short to long to short again, are separated by blackouts or by the dimming of lights that pulsate like distress signals from a passing ship—but what is the danger? I can’t say, because the characters in McPherson’s play can’t say. We watch, for the most part impassively, as “The Night Alive” ’s five characters cling to the refuse-laden reef of their lives—a space littered with greasy food, misbegotten children, bloodstained T-shirts, used condoms, cheap cologne bottles, broken promises, the rubbish of love. From this they try to build a home, but there is no comfort there—not even a window through which to look out at the passing world.

Tommy (Ciarán Hinds) lives in the garden flat of a new Edwardian house in Dublin that is owned by his stereotypically meddlesome old cousin, Maurice (the amusing Jim Norton). Tommy is in his fifties, and as lean as a mean joke. He wears his black hair slicked back; maybe he uses his constant flop sweat as a kind of gel. Not that Tommy would recognize himself as an anxious person; he doesn’t know who he is, especially in relation to the tremendous loss he has experienced. Separated from his wife and children, Tommy lives off odd jobs, some of which he shares with his best mate, Doc (strongly played by Michael McElhatton), and he treats his home the way he treats his body: with not entirely benign neglect.

It’s night. Tommy enters with a woman, who is hurt. Picking his way through the detritus of his dark flat, he turns on a lamp, but its slight glow barely illuminates the high-ceilinged space. Does Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne)—that’s what his guest is called—have a euro so that he can turn on the electric coin meter? No? Never mind. She’s busy trying to keep her nose from bleeding any more than it already is and trying to pull herself together after the shock of being hit. Tommy didn’t hit her; a man she hitched a ride with—whom she claims to barely know—did. After sorting out the lights, Tommy takes a look at Aimee’s face, but fails to see beyond it to her spiritually battered condition. Their first real conversation is as bumbling and unintentionally comic as any first-date chat:

Tommy: Well, the bleeding has stopped.

Aimee: Is it broken?

Tommy: I don’t know, love—it looks swollen.

Aimee: I have a big nose anyway.

Tommy: Like very big?

Aimee: Big enough.

Tommy: Was it always crooked?

Aimee: Yeah, a bit.

Tommy: Crooked to the left or the right?

Aimee: The left.

Tommy: To my left?

Aimee: Yeah.

Tommy: O.K. Then I don’t think he broke it.

It’s because Aimee’s problems appear to be purely corporeal and cosmetic—they aren’t, and Aimee knows it—that Tommy is able to deal with the situation: he’s a series of impulses, triggered by the obvious.

Aimee and Tommy didn’t meet under the best of circumstances—he was out buying a bag of chips when he came across her and the man who hit her—but, in a way, that drama works for Tommy. Aimee’s misfortune chuffs him up, gives him a role that he hasn’t played for a while, at least in his own mind: that of a responsible man. And this is what responsible men do—scoop up damsels in distress, like Aimee, whether or not they have brought that distress on themselves. Aimee’s matter-of-fact, depressed presence fills Tommy with the excitement of being part of a narrative again, a player in the conventions of love. And her company gives him the hope that he was learning to live without: if she stays, perhaps someone will remember him after he’s gone? Tell people what he was like, how he smelled, what he ate, the music he liked to dance to?

But, as the play goes on, Tommy’s feelings for this divisive girl become more tentative. She’s a sometime prostitute, and they eventually share a bed, though the experience is perfunctory; their need and their avoidance of intimacy act as a prophylactic. If you are unused to desire, it can seem as elusive as reciprocation. (Hinds brilliantly shows us how Tommy shadowboxes with his own heart.) Watching Aimee and Tommy go through the motions brought to mind another female object of desire: Ellida, in Henrik Ibsen’s 1888 realist, symbolism-heavy play, “The Lady from the Sea.” Ellida is torn between desire and obligation. Aimee, too, must choose—her past is not as dead to her as she lets on—but, in Dunne’s accomplished portrayal, it’s never quite clear that she can be trusted to make the right choice. Dunne conveys this with her furtive way of speaking and her blank silences. It’s as if Aimee had grown weary of her own con but is helpless to stop it: she’s been on the grift so long that it’s the only language she speaks.

In previous works, such as “The Weir” (1997) and “Shining City” (2004), McPherson hung loneliness around his characters like a mist. What I recall best about his earlier plays isn’t their plots or even my feelings about them but their atmosphere—the kind of gray haze one sees in a Gerhard Richter drawing, say, with faces and bodies floating in the distance. But although McPherson is interested in romanticism—the small-town characters in “The Weir,” for instance, are as wedded to their ghosts and their nostalgia as they are to their desire for escape—he has a tendency to undercut it with a pedestrian, self-conscious form of realism, which, weirdly, reveals few truths, universal or particular. McPherson uses realism, instead, to sandbag his characters into a kind of truthiness and ragtag mysticism; he’s not relaxed enough—or deep enough—as an artist to be truly romantic. He’s a moralist, albeit one who soft-pedals his moral leanings. (In a 2004 interview, he said, “To me a play, or any art, is just like the paintings on the cave walls that the first human beings did. . . . What a bizarre experience it is to know that we are alive. And wonder if there is a God, and will something save us.”)

In the end, it’s evil that McPherson, like many a moralist before him, responds to. And in “The Night Alive” that evil is personified by Kenneth (the powerful Brian Gleeson), Aimee’s ex-boyfriend, who may be the thug who was beating her when Tommy met her. Soon, we learn that Aimee is still involved with Kenneth, and that his sadism—he attacks Doc, too—is what feeds her beleaguered sense of self. When things turn melodramatic toward the end of the play—a betrayal, an attempted theft, a murder—we are less interested than we should be, because McPherson uses Kenneth not as an organic part of the story but as a symbol of the dark forces that will try to undo any genuine attempt at connection. Doc—who gives the play some Art Carney-like comic relief—is also denied his humanity, both in the writing and in the direction, because McPherson’s art doesn’t accommodate individuals; it accommodates only his influences—John Osborne’s outsider heroes and Martin McDonagh’s violence. But McPherson lacks the wildness, the honesty, and the unpredictability that fuel the greatest strength of those playwrights’ largely realistic work: their emotional surrealism. ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, wrote the catalogue essay for the Robert Gober retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.